Science fiction finally gave up childish things in the 1960s. But like many adolescents, it only grew up because theugly real world intruded on its immature fantasies.

Let's put a measuring tape to it. In the summer of 1957,just a few weeks before the launch of the first Sputnikspace satellite, some 23 science fiction magazineswere operating in the United States. By the end of 1960,only six remained. During a period of just 28 months,fifteen sci-fi magazines disappeared from the magazineracks.

This truly was an amazing story, astounding even, butdid not get reported in the pages of Amazing Storiesand Astounding Stories—two of the survivors. (Although Astounding, in a move that now seems especiallywrong-headed, changed its name to Analog—clearlymissing out on the coming digital age.) These pulpfiction stragglers were too busy trying to stay alive.Even the survivors in this shakeout were on a flimsyfinancial footing, and many a sci-fi writer rushed to thebank to cash a payment check before another magazinebit the lunar dust.

So many ironies here. The space age had arrived, andthe rivalry between the US and the USSR promised tovalidate all the outlandish future-tripping forecasts thesepulp magazines had been peddling for the past thirtyyears. It didn't seem fair that workaday journalists shouldnow steal away their readers. But who needed Satellitemagazine (defunct 1959) or Space Travel (defunct 1958),when you could read about actual satellites and spacetravel in your daily newspaper? Who wanted to spendleisure time reading tales aboutthermonuclear destructionwhen the neighbor next doorwas setting up an actualbomb shelter in his basement?But the irony also playedout on a grander karmic level:what cruel deity had decidedthat purveyors of fantasyshould get a dose ofreality therapy—forced intoretreat because truth wasstranger than even sciencefiction.

2.

But something far stranger was about to happen. The veryforces that threatened to kill off the sci-fi genre actuallysaved it.

The old formulas didn't work anymore. Stories about rocketships and bug-eyed monsters from outer space would nolonger pay the rent. Tales about nuclear bombs proved tobe duds at the magazine rack. In the new environment,science fiction writers needed new formulas—or even better, needed to have the courage to operate without pre-cookedrecipes of any sort. In short, science fiction needed to growup and take on the adult world, in all its messiness anduncertainty.

Everything was now in flux. A few of the old-timers managedto adapt to the new environment. Robert Heinlein had beenpeddling juvenile outer space stories in the 1950s, but inthe 1960s he reinvented himself as a counterculture guruand delivered at least two genuine masterworks, Stranger ina Strange Land and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. PhilipK. Dick had been publishing sci-fi stories since the early1950s, but his interest in altered states of consciousnessand different spheres of reality made him the perfect story-teller for the psychadelic 60s. Ursula K. Le Guin had firstsubmitted a story to Astounding back before World War IIwhen she was only eleven-years-old, but she only got intoher stride in the 1960s and 1970s when her skill in blendingadvanced sociological themes into genre fiction helped hermove from Amazing Stories to the pages of The New Yorker.Arthur C. Clarke was an old man of sci-fi who had first madehis name back in the mid-1930s, and though he had aharder time adapting to the new zeitgeist, even he managedto shake up the younger generation with 2001: A SpaceOdyssey, his film-and-book collaboration with directorStanley Kubrick.

But these were the exceptions. Most of the excitement camefrom newcomers and outsiders. Kurt Vonnegut had publishedhis first science fiction novel back in 1952, but he tended toavoid writing for the pulp genre magazines. He had no interestin becoming the 'next Isaac Asimov' or the 'next Arthur C.Clarke'. Instead Vonnegut hoped to conquer the world ofmainstream literary fiction with satire, dark humor and asmattering of sci-fi concepts—an almost impossible ambition,it seemed at the time, but the success of Ray Bradbury had already proven that a few mortals were equipped (or perhaps'allowed' is the better word) to escape the genre ghetto.With Cats Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegutachieved the highest honors possible for a sci-fi author. No,not a Hugo and Nebula—many a hack has received one ofthose—but rather a place in the literary fiction rack at thebookstore and inclusion on school assigned reading lists.

Yet even more shocking were the renowned literary lionswho embraced science fiction. Why in the world didVladimar Nabokov tell a BBC interviewer in 1968 "I loathescience fiction," and then publish a sci-fi book, Ada or Ardor,the following year? What motivated Walker Percy, winner ofthe National Book Award for The Moviegoer (1961) to turn tosci-fi with Love in the Ruins a decade later? Why were themost promising experimental American writers of the newgeneration embracing sci-fi plots—for example John Barthwith Giles Goat-Boy and Thomas Pynchon with Gravity'sRainbow? Why did William Burroughs feel compelled toinsert science fiction concepts into his rambling cut-and-paste novels?

The very existence of such books represented a slap inthe face to the core sci-fi market—namely, adolescentsand teens. Asimov did not prepare them for Ada. Gernsbackdid not pave the path to Giles Goat-Boy. Frankly, manyof these books would have been confiscated by teachersand parents during that period of literary ferment. I stillrecall the day my fourth grade teacher at St. Joseph'sElementary School seized my cousin's copy of a JamesBond novel (Moonraker) and denounced it as inappropriatereading, even as I breathed a sigh of relief that she had notseen my copy of Live and Let Die. I don't even want toimagine what would have happened if a book by VladimirNabokov or William Burroughs had been found at my desk.The Naked Lunch might have spurred a school lockdown,and intervention by the local bishop.

3.

Yes, this was an unlikely revolution in the sci-fi field. Butnothing seemed capable of stopping the trend once it wasset in motion, and it clearly respected no geographicalborders. Even as the US emerged as the winner in thespace race, it faced increasingly intense competition inthe sci-fi racket. In the early sixties, Britain seemed on thebrink of eclipsing the US as the center of experimentalscience fiction. In continental Europe, leading writers ofthe new generation, such as Italo Calvino and StanisławLem, inserted science fiction concepts into ambitiousworks of literary fiction.

The globalization of sci-fi as a trendy artistic construct wasalso evident beyond the world of books. Certainly no onewas surprised when Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 gotmade into a movie, but who expected that the director wouldbe hipper-than-hip French filmmaker François Truffaut?Almost at that same moment, Truffaut's illustrious rival incutting edge French cinema, Jean-Luc Godard was alsopushing ahead with his sci-fi film Alphaville (1965). For betteror worse, sci-fi was moving beyond stale Hollywood formulasand entering the realm of avant-garde art. When FedericoFellini released his ancient Rome movie Satyricon (1969) atthe close of the decade, he made the puzzling pronouncementthat it represented "science fiction of the past"—a bizarrenotion, but very much aligned with the spirit of the age.

The subject of fantasy is beyond the scope of this essay, butI must note in passing that down in Latin America at this samejuncture, a whole generation of world-beating writers wereinserting magic (heaven forbid!) into their most audaciousbooks. These authors must have perceived the risk of taintingtheir serious novels with genre concepts, but they understood—long before most readers and critics even noticed!—thatgenre fiction wasn't what it used to be.

Today, we are very familiar with highbrow literary writersincorporating fantasy and science fiction into their works.Many of the most admired writers of our day—HarukiMurakami, Cormac McCarthy, Jonathan Lethem, JenniferEgan, J.K. Rowling, David Mitchell, and others—do this with impunity. (Well, almost with impunity—James Wood still triesto knock 'em down a peg for their bad taste in pursuing, in hiswords "the demented intricacy of science fiction.") But thisfertile marriage between highbrow and lowbrow could hardlyhave happened without the pioneering efforts of Pynchon, Vonnegut, Dick, Nabokov,Le Guin and others renegadesback in that crucial period from the late 1950s to the early1970s—that glorious moment when science fiction grew up.

4.

And then there was the New Wave!

Here was a radical movement whoseexponents hoped to reinvent sciencefiction from the inside out. Theseweren't literary lions slumming withthe genre writers for cheap thrills,but sci-fi careerists who wanted tochange the entire landscape of thefield. They knew the science fictiontradition, had grown up on it, butnow aimed to subvert every aspectof this inheritance. The leaders ofthe New Wave violated taboos andtackled subjects that, back in the1950s, would have been too hot to handle. They incorporatedexperimental techniques never before applied to sci-finarratives. The were masters of parody, pastiche and apanoply of postmodern perspectives; yet they also couldsurprise by returning to straight narrative and the classicthemes of the genre tradition.

Britain set off this revolution. Give credit to D.H. Lawrence. No,not for his science fiction books (he didn't write any), but forhis estate's success in winning the 1960 court battle thatallowed London publisher Penguin Books to sell unexpurgatedcopies of Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. In the aftermathof this decision, British readers could enjoy previously bannedfiction, provided the publisher could demonstrate "literarymerit." The doors were now open, and in a surprisingdevelopment, the new permissive environment changedthe course of science fiction.

Anthony Burgess was never considered part of the sci-fiNew Wave, and he later tried to disown his now famousdystopian novel A Clockwork Orange (1962). "It becameknown as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorifysex and violence," he later explained."The film made it easy for readers ofthe book to misunderstand what it wasabout. I should not have written thebook because of this danger ofmisinterpretation, and the same maybe said of Lawrence and LadyChatterley's Lover." Despite suchprotestations, Burgess's novelremains an impressive achievement,bold in its prose and even bolder inits subject matter. Yet this wasprecisely the kind of book thatcould justify its disturbing contentbecause of its "literary merit." In somedegree, it served as a blueprint for the next decade inscience fiction.

Burgess followed up with another dystopian novel (TheWanting Seed), but mostly avoided sci-fi concepts in lateryears. It would be left to others to build on this achievementand take British science fiction to new levels of rudenessand radness. J.G. Ballard had already published his firstnovel when Burgess released A Clockwork Orange, andthough his early sci-fi work—which focused on variousecological disaster scenarios—is poised and confident, ithardly prepared readers for the outlandish ventures ahead.Even today The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) stands out as themost transgressive science fiction book ever released. Andit was just barely released. Almost a decade after the Lady Chatterley's Lover decision, Ballard could still stir upenough controversy to spur the president of his publisher,Nelson Doublday Jr. himself, to order all copies of thebook destroyed! Literary trends have come and gone inthe intervening decades, but this work still shocks on almostevery page. Ballard would go on to write other controversialbooks—most notably Crash (1973), his horrific paean toauto fatalities—and solidify his reputation as the baddest badboy of British sci-fi. Not all of this writing holds up well today,but sci-fi clearly benefited from the adrenalin jolt of Ballard'sintervention.

Yet others were giving him a run for his money. Some ofBrian Aldiss's work comes across as derivative—you canalmost chart the various books that influenced him as youread each chapter. But at his best, his reckless audacityjumps off the page. And his range during the 1960s maybe the widest of any sci-fi writer of that period. Itencompassed fabulistic future-tripping (Hot House),psychedelic armageddon (Barefoot in the Head), and even self-canceling meta-narrative (Report on Probability A).

Michael Moorcock completes this triumvirate of British NewWave stars. His influence as an editor surpasses hisachievements as a writer—as reigning guru overseeingthe periodical New Worlds, he regularly delivered amegadose of dicey sci-fi content for a reasonable twoshillings and six pence. Well, perhaps not so regularly;some months the magazine never appeared on the news-stand. The internal chaos at New Worlds caused a few ofthese interruptions, but censorship by retailers also playeda role. Yet if you did get your hands on a copy, you wouldn'tbe bored. Moorcock's writings are too disorganized for mytaste, but his hubris was off the chart. On any list of"science fiction books not to recommend to a Christianreader," his Behold the Man gets top spot. And his JerryCornelius stories make Nietzsche look like a lukewarmnihilist by comparison. In an age in which success wasoften measured by how many people you could piss off,Moorcock met or exceeded his quota every month.

As the 1960s progressed, US writers began playing a largerrole in this sci-fi revolution. For many readers, HarlanEllison stands out as the most representative figure ofradicalized sci-fi, and like Moorcock he made his markboth as writer and editor. Ellison's anthology DangerousVisions (1967) is a mixed bag, but despite its limitations itmay be the single best starting-point for readers who wantto comprehend the tectonic shift underway in 1960s genrefiction. Yet I like Ellison even better as a memoirist andfiction writer—by any measure, he ranks among the leadingshort story authors of his generation. But others were readyto vie with him for preeminence in edgy American sci-fi.Native New Yorker Norman Spinrad enjoyed the distinctionof getting copies of New Worlds pulled off the shelves at thelargest magazine retailers in Britain, when Moorcock serialzedparts of Bug Jack Barron, and his works not only pushedforward the New Wave agenda, but also anticipated elementsof the later cyberpunk movement. Thomas M. Disch also standsout in any survey of US sci-fi experimenters, and not just forhis skill as a storyteller—his work as a historian and critic ofgenre literature are required reading for those seeking aninsider's perspective on the changes at play.

5.

And how did they do it?

Well, let's ask the class to do a brief exercise. Take a sheetof paper, and make a list of the topics you aren't supposed totalk about in polite company. For example:

Okay, got the list? The leading sci-fi authors of the 1960sand 1970s probably had a list more or less similar to yours.And then they wrote stories about every subject on the list.

Pretty clever, no?

To be honest, the best science fiction writers of the perioddid more than just tweak the sensibilities of the easily outraged.But to some degree, the worst writers in any movement helpyou understand its sources of raw energy. And the hackswere delighted to discover that they could finally write about,say, cannibalism and cannabis in the same story, and noone would slap them on the wrist. I'm reminded of the characterin a Coens brothers film who coyly asks "Are you takingadvantage of the new freedoms?" The writers discussed herecould almost uniformly answer 'yes' to that question, but whilesome were taking advantage of them to good effect, othersmerely sought notoriety and shock value.

You have been waiting for me to talk about the sex—certainlyit shows up in most of these books. And I will get to it in amoment. But first let me state the less-than-obvious: namelythat the most fertile subject for 1960s sci-fi was religion. Infact, if you consider the novels that won the Hugo from thelate 1950s through the early 1970s, the majority of themdealt with theological issues. Their approaches varieddramatically, but the best of them—A Case of Conscience,A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Left Hand of Darkness,Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land—rank among the mostinsightful works of spiritual fiction from the mid-20th century.Back in the days of Edgar Rice Burroughs and HugoGernsback, who would have believed that these escapistspace operas would evolve into serious explorations ofspirituality and belief systems? But such was the destinyof sci-fi during the period of its most ardent experimentation.

And, yes, there was sex, lots of it. But not just couplings,triplings and intergalactic miscegenation. In the works ofUrsula Le Guin, James Tiptree Jr., Joanna Russ, amongothers, science fiction addressed, for the first time in itshistory, issues of gender roles, sexual orientation andfeminism. At first glance, sci-fi might seem an inhospitableenvironment for such subjects—after all, the core audiencefor the genre, since timeimmemorial, had beenteenage males, and theirfantasies and interests hadalways unduly influencedwhat got published and read.But the "new freedoms" thatallowed science fiction writersto reimagine social structuresand cultural norms also served,in some degree, to compensatefor the biases inherent in thisdemographic tilt. For authorswho were prepared to challengethe status quo, a whole range of options were made availablethat were closed off to practitioners of strict realism. Face it,sex is sex, but when you incorporate alien life forms andradical technologies, even Masters and Johnson seem primby comparison.

6.

But the revolution in 1960s science fiction was more than justthe infusion of new subjects (religion, sex, etc.) to replacethe old ones (robots, space, etc.). Writers were alsoexperimenting with stream of consciousness techniques,fragmented narrative structures, cut-and-paste methodsand other different ways of constructing sentences andparagraphs.

Unless you have read deeply into 1960s and 1970s sci-fi,you may not realize how much influence James Joyceexerted on the field. But his impact can be seen in many ofthe key works of the era. Philip José Farmer won a Hugo forhis 1967 novella "Riders of the Purple Wage," which reachesits climax with a Joycean pun that even Joyce would havefound too extreme. In Barefoot in the Head (1969), BrianAldiss made the bold, albeit implausible, prediction thatfuturistic people drugged out on a sufficient amount ofhallucinogenics would start talking in Joycean stream-of-consciousness sentences. In Dhalgren (1975), Samuel R.Delany even aimed at delivering a sci-fi Finnegans Wake—one that clocked in at almost 900 pages, longer thananything Joyce himself had attempted. We also see stream-of-consciousness in Thomas Disch's Camp Concentration,Philip K. Dick's VALIS, Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron,and in crossover sci-fi works such as Gravity's Rainbow andAda.

And why not? After all, if Joyce heralded the future of fiction,sci-fi embraced the fiction of the future. Why shouldn't theygo together? In The Divine Invasion, the second book in theVALIS trilogy, Philip K. Dick captured precisely this meetingpoint, when he announced, "I'm going to prove that Finnegans Wake is an information pool based on computer memorysystems that didn't exist until centuries after James Joyce'sera; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousnessfrom which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpusof work. I'll be famous forever."

But Joyce was hardly the only role model for experimentalsci-fi writers of the period. John Brunner won a Hugo forStand on Zanzibar (1968), which takes the fragmented styleof John Dos Passos's USA Trilogy and applies it to a storyset 40 years in the future.In Slaughterhouse-Five,Kurt Vonnegut realizedthat a time travel angleallowed him to tell hisautobiographical WorldWar II narrative with aquirky non-linear chronology.Calvino mixes the fabulisticand Kafkaesque into hisCosmicomics, even whileincorporating scientificjargon on virtually everypage of the book. Aldiss'sReport on Probability Atakes metanarrative to anextreme I have neverencountered in any other book, whether genre, avant-gardeor mainstream. None of these works could have beenconceived of, let alone published, during the Golden Ageof science fiction back in the 1930s and 1940s. But theyset the tone during the 1960s.

7.

Why does this matter?

I focus on this era in the history of sci-fi because it laid thegroundwork for one of the most important developments incurrent-day fiction. Indeed, perhaps the single most significantshift in the literature of our time.

In recent decades, many of the most exciting voices incontemporary fiction have worked to tear down the BerlinWall separating highbrow literature and genre concepts. Ina beautiful twist of fate, we have come full circle, back to theage of bards and oral storytelling, when the fanciful andimaginary were at the core of literary culture.

We learn many things from authors such as Haruki Murakami,J.K. Rowling, Jonathan Lethem, David Mitchell, José Saramago,Jennifer Egan, Mo Yan, Margaret Atwood and David FosterWallace, among others practitioners of non-realism (or what Icall 'conceptual fiction')—not the least that even in our jadedcurrent day we still crave myth and fantasy. And ourreceptivity to new perspectives might even be heightenedwhen 'serious' subjects are taken outside of the realm ofstrict verisimilitude. A few critics have bemoaned this retreatfrom pure Balzacian and Tolstoyan 'true-to-life' writing,but increasingly they sound like the old Soviet commissarswho demanded socialist realism from the writers theybadgered into submission. If writers are truly free—andshouldn't they be?—this freedom must also encompass theright to envision new worlds outside the empirical structure ofthe existing one. After all, storytelling began with just thatkind of imaginative leap.

If this is true—and I believe it is—we ought to celebrate thepioneers of the 1960s and 1970s who blazed the trail. Theypulled conceptual fiction out of the ghetto of escapism andgenre formulas, and turned it into something big and bold,experimental and transgressive. We are still learning fromtheir experiences, and ought to give them a bit of thanks fortheir troubles. Maybe even get their books back into print, readand discussed, assigned and studied. Science fiction did growup and, face it, they were the ones who got us through thegrowing pains.

Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. Hisnext book, a history of love songs, will be published by OxfordUniversity Press in February.

Is Gravity’s Rainbow a work of science fiction? For my part, I haveno problem acknowledging Pynchon's sci-fi credentials. Then again,almost every other kind of ingredient shows up eventually in this book.